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While it is generally accepted that some homeless people in large cities make use of abandoned underground structures for shelter, urban legends persist that make stronger assertions. These include claims that "mole people" have formed small, ordered societies similar to tribes, numbering up to hundreds, living underground year-round. It has also been suggested that they have developed their own cultural traits and even have electricity by illegal hook-up. The subject has attracted some attention from sociologists but is highly controversial due to a lack of evidence.[citation needed]

Jennifer Toth's 1993 book The Mole People: Life In The Tunnels Beneath New York City,[3] written while she was an intern at the Los Angeles Times, was promoted as a true account of travels in the tunnels and interviews with tunnel dwellers. The book helped canonize the image of the mole people as an ordered society living literally under people's feet. However, few claims in her book have been verified, and it includes inaccurate geographical information, numerous factual errors, and an apparent reliance on largely unprovable statements. The strongest criticism came from New York City Subway historian Joseph Brennan, who declared, "Every fact in this book that I can verify independently is wrong."[4]Cecil Adams's The Straight Dope contacted Toth in 2004,[5] and noted the large amount of unverifiability in her stories, while declaring that the book's accounts seemed to be truthful. A later article, after contact with Brennan, was more skeptical of Toth's truthfulness.[6]

Media accounts have reported "mole people" living underneath other cities as well. In the Las Vegas Valley, it is estimated about 1,000[9] homeless people find shelter in the storm drains underneath the city for protection from extreme temperatures that exceed 115 °F (46 °C) while dropping below 30 °F (−1 °C) in winter. Most of the inhabitants are turned away from the limited charities in Las Vegas and find shelter in the industrial infrastructure of the Las Vegas Strip, similar to most cities. The Las Vegas Channel 8 News sent their Eyewitness News I-Team with Matt O'Brien, the local author who spent nearly five years exploring beneath the city to write the book Beneath the Neon. Las Vegas is in Clark County: according to the Clark County Regional Flood Control District the valley has about 450 miles (720 km) of flood control channels and tunnels, and about 300 miles (480 km) of those are underground.[10] A September 24, 2009, article in the British paper The Sun interviewed some of the inhabitants of the Las Vegas Valley mole people, and included photographs.[11]

The second version of the Mole People is the concept of a separate oppressed and sometimes forgotten society living underground away from the rest of society, most often seen in science fiction, such as Demolition Man, Futurama (in the form of "Sewer Mutants"), The Matrix, and many others.

The concept of mole people is used in many science fiction media, though rarely using that name.

There is a stock character version of the mole people that are used in different media appearances, which is inspired by the fictional Morlocks which appear in H.G. Wells' novel The Time Machine.